November 5, 2012
If you’ve seen the new Ben Affleck film, Argo, you’ll know that Canada didn’t really play much of a role in the rescue of six American embassy employees during the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-80. Although the Americans were secretly housed in the homes of Canadian diplomats and were given Canadian passports, forcing Canada to close its embassy, it was actually the CIA, and more especially Hollywood, that did the real work.
The basic Argo plot: a CIA operative (Affleck) goes to Iran posing as a Canadian filmmaker scouting locations for a Hollywood sci-fi flick called Argo. He brings out the six Americans disguised as a team of Canadian filmmakers who had supposedly entered the country with him. That’s a lot of Canadians for a Hollywood sci-fi movie, but anyway…
In fact we have three films here: first, a good little thriller; a nail-biter that builds the tension to Bourne-again levels, even though we already know they all got out safely. Second, we have an often humorous paean to Hollywood—without which, we now learn, the CIA was totally helpless. Third, we have a revisionist version of events which reveals that Canada was simply a bystander and that all Iranians are bad, mad or stupid. Or all three.
What’s more, we may now have an explanation for Canada’s precipitous closure of its Iranian embassy in September this year.
But first the important stuff. Argo’s only sympathetic Iranian amidst the horde of sinister officials, demented students, frightening airport authorities and terrifying shopkeepers is the cook-housekeeper who works for Ambassador Taylor and his wife. And even she’s a bit dim. Taylor’s wife whispers that she thinks the housekeeper “suspects something”. As well she might with a houseful of hard-drinking, hard-smoking guests who whine and argue and never go outside for almost three months.
With Argo, the true story can at last be told, or so the movie ads tell us. In fact, it has been told before, first in a 1981 book—The Canadian Caper, by Canadian journalist Jean Pelletier, who figured it out before the escape and who sat on the story until the Americans were safe. And it was told again in a 1981 Canadian TV movie called Escape from Tehran: The Canadian Caper with Ken Taylor played by Gordon Pinsent in something more than the background role he gets in the Affleck film. Director Affleck cuts a few corners, notably the fact that only three of the Americans stayed at the Taylor house; the other three stayed at the home of immigration officer John Sheardown. Argo, in fact, gives the impression that the Canadian embassy and the Taylor household were pretty much one and the same, with a staff consisting only of Taylor and a Canadian soldier wearing a uniform that might have been designed by Col. Gaddafi. Lots of other corners are cut, but as Affleck has explained to petulant Canadian critics, this is a “based upon” movie.
It was only in 1988 that diplomatic ties were re-established between Canada and Iran, but the subsequent relationship was bumpy. Canadian concerns over Iran’s human rights record and its nuclear program were exacerbated by the death in custody of Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi in 2003. Relations grew worse over increasing international concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Canada has joined with the United States and others in the international sanctions program against Iran, and DFAIT must have noted with concern the November 2011 invasion of the British Embassy in Tehran. Britain broke diplomatic ties at that time, but Canada persisted until John Baird’s abrupt 2012 announcement that Canada was breaking all diplomatic ties and giving Iranian diplomats five days to get out.
Despite Baird’s claim that Iran is “the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today,” the sudden announcement on September 7 left the media, opposition parties and academics scratching their heads. Why now? Why so belligerent? Why so urgent? Obviously they hadn’t yet seen Argo, which opened precisely five weeks later on October 12. But maybe John Baird had, and feared another embassy invasion. Maybe, like Ben Affleck, he just doesn’t like Iranians. Maybe he is true to his word and won’t allow Canada to play footsie with dictators. Maybe he needed the furniture for one of the consulates in China or the new Canadian Embassy in Burma. Or maybe we’ll have to wait another 30 years for Hollywood to tell us the truth. Whatever the answer, Iranian officials are probably echoing a line used several times in the movie, “Argo f*** yourself.”